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Venom PL · August 24th, 2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by mmarsh

One warning....

The copy protection only allows for 2 installs.

Quote:

Elizabeth Tobey, 2K Forum administrator -- and ardent opponent of sentence capitalization -- has posted a response to the many angry gamers thread on the 2K's forums in regards to SecuROM 'situation': "hey guys, first, let me say this. you DO NOT NEED TO USE THE INTERNET EVERY TIME YOU PLAY THIS GAME. it is only the first time. second, you can uninstall and reinstall this game, and if, by chance, you have 2 computers you want to simultaneously play this game on, you also can do that. if by some chance you are reinstalling this game without uninstalling it first, a lot, there is a chance you may have to call securom and get a key, or deactivate some older installations. but if you upgrade your hardware next week, you'll still be able to play the game. if you revamp your system and need to reinstall bioshock, just uninstall it before you go through the overhaul, and then do your reinstall."
If an uninstallation permits the user another installation of the game, then this makes this copy-protection a little bit more palatable; bit still, there could be many gamers left up the creek in the case of a Windows failure, and it would have been nice if this issue was addressed somewhere in the documentation for the product.

According to forum chatter, many people are having problems getting Bioshock's uninstall feature to 'credit' them a reinstallation of the game. Furthermore, for users that have this problem, asking for assistance from SecuROM will get your email redirected to 2K, and writing 2K about it will get you unhelpfully redirected to SecuROM. The man behind Bioshock, Ken Levine, came onto the forums to issue this brief statement: "I've followed up on the circular email with securom and we are working on this issue. I agree, it sucks, and we need to get that sorted."
We'll have to wait a while, to see what happens. In the meantime, be careful how many times you install this latest title from Take-Two-Copies-Only Interactive.

Source: http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/7034/

Update:

Quote:

UPDATES ON SECUROM™, PC ACTIVATION, AND A TECHNICAL FAQ

August 23, 2007

We have been reading and listening to your frustrations over SecuROM, PC activation problems, and technical support issues since BioShock launched on Tuesday, and we've devised a plan to help.

Starting immediately, we will be upping the activation count to a 5 by 5 plan.
We will be raising the maximum amount of computers a user can have BioShock installed on simultaneously from 2 to 5, and allowing a user to reinstall BioShock on each of those computers from 3 times to 5 times.
Also, we have in the works a revoke tool which you will be able to run on your machine if you want to free up that key and move it to to another computer (this works very much like Steam or iTunes system). We are also working with SecuROM and 2K customer service, so that when you do need to call in support problems, you get answers to your questions faster, without much waiting or being bounced around.
SecuROM has been given much more autonomy to help fix your problems quickly and effectively.
I am personally sorry for anyone who got bounced around in the past couple days (I even think I contributed to this problem) and we're going to make sure that does not happen in the future.

As for other technical issues, we are bringing on a team of tech support that will be on the 2K forums 24/7 to help people resolve their technical issues. Our QA guys are in the offices and on the forums, too, reproducing issues and looking for workarounds and compiling information that they can put towards making you a patch and updating the knowledge base.

Also, we are aware that our activation server went down last night, stopping some of you from finishing your installs.
The server is up and running now and we have corrected the problem that caused that crash.

Finally, we have released a FAQ, which you can view in full below (and will also be posted on the 2K Forums in the Technical Support area) that will help clear up a lot of questions and misinformation that has been floating around about SecuROM and PC activation.

And as for widescreen, we also want to say we completely understand a user's desire to augment their FOV.
BioShock is a harrowing experience, but we don't want anyone to feel limited (or motion sick!). So we are in the process of working on an official PC patch to give widescreen PC users a choice to expand their horizontal FOV, and are investigating creating a similar update for the 360.

And finally, I want to personally congratulate Racer_S from the Widescreen Gaming Forums, and his awesome user patch to expand the widescreen FOV in BioShock. I'm currently tracking him down via email, but hopefully, he'll accept my gratitude, and maybe an Nvidia 8800 to boot.

Source (official game site) - http://www.2kgames.com/cultofrapture/home.html